It's just more evidence that the politics of change isn't really part of the plan for Obama. The idea is to make it look like that, but play the beltway game exactly the same as all the other candidates.

I just went to Obama's website (courtesy of your link, Michael...) to behold this awful example of undermining and ridiculing.....and I just can't find it.  

What your link led me to was an entry that quoted a recent edition of First Read (not, last I checked, an organ of the Obama campaign...) suggesting that Mr Krugman has changed his tune on Obama's health care plan since it's original rollout.  And then the entry proceeds to juxtipose quotes from Mr Krugman "then' as opposed to Mr Krugman "now".  If highlighting a descrepancy pointed out by a failry objective journalistic news source is "undermining his credibility" and "ridiculing", then I need to find myself a new dictionary.  Cause my definitions and yours don't jibe.

What did Harry Truman say when admonised to give the Republicans "Hell" by somebody in the crowd?  "I don't need to give them hell.  I just tell the truth and they think it's hell"? If anbody thinks what Obama is doing is "ridicule", they should look again.  Obama's campaign just told the truth (in the man's own words), and it feels like ridicule.

I'm neither a fan nor a critic of Paul Krugman (although I've always thought he was a much better economist than political commentator), but it looks like more than co-incidence to me that in the space of a week or so, he launched two gratuitous attacks on Obama that exactly corroborate the Clinton party line at the very moment they were trying to find some issues with Obama (Health Care and Social Security).  And in the case of mandates and health care, it took him several months to realize how flawed Obama's plan was.  And just in time for the last month before the Iowa caucuses.   Far be it from me to impugn Mr Krugman's integrity, but it does smell funny.

(I think another truth loving journalist I've read has gone back over Mr Krugman's pontificating on the "Social Security Crisis" - and yes he used to thing there was one, not long ago - and discovered similar inconsistencies.)

Someone on another forum just posted that "Fact check" page about Krugman on Obama's site. What a hack job. I was really taken aback. Shame on him.

For fun, just click on those links that they included (that, at least, they did). You can track how the Obama campaign uses highly selective quoting to spin the case that Krugman has flip-flopped. There is little to it.

For example, right in the first item, the Obama campaign posits this quote of Krugman's from his 30 Nov article as a reversal from what he wrote earlier:

"KRUGMAN NOW: "The Fundamental Weakness Of The Obama Plan Was Apparent From The Beginning." Paul Krugman wrote, "The fundamental weakness of the Obama plan was apparent from the beginning."

That's supposed to contradict the praise Krugman spent in an earlier June column, which they quote above, under the lead "KRUGMAN THEN".

Never mind that if you click the link for his June column, you'll find that he did already write, back then:

"Now for the bad news. Although Mr. Obama says he has a plan for universal health care, he actually doesn’t — a point Mr. Edwards made in last night’s debate. The Obama plan doesn’t mandate insurance for adults. [..] In that regard it’s actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan."

So yes, the weakness of the Obama plan was indeed apparent from the beginning - and Krugman actually argued that right back then in that first column already. No flip-flop, no contradiction.

Vanwurs, if you think that "Obama's campaign just told the truth", you should click those links and compare what Krugman actually said.

Here, another example - just moving straight to the second comparison in their list.

Under the title, "COURAGE AND TOUGHNESS VS. WEAKNESS AND CAUTION", the page makes it seem like Krugman had nothing but praise for Obama's plan back in June - <i>Obama's Plan Passes A "Basic Test of Courage"</i>! While now, on 30 November, this same Krugman writes,

"What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama's caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan."

See, he grossly contradicts himself! Except, of course, he doesn't, in the least - it's just the Obama campaign selectively quoting again. In fact, in that first column back in June, Krugman already wrote almost exactly the same thing he says now. Back then he wrote,

"The Obama plan doesn’t mandate insurance for adults. [..] In that regard it’s actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan. [..] Call it the timidity of hope. On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn’t quell my worries that Mr. Obama’s dislike of “bitter and partisan” politics makes him too cautious."

So what Krugman wrote now in fact is an almost direct rephrasing of what he already wrote back then; and yet the Obama campaign tries to spin it into a Krugman flip-flop - because he dared criticize Barack. It's a shameful hack job.

Jobeek2,

While you're clicking on links on Obama's web page, wjy don't you click on the very first one a read the First Read take on Krugman "then" and Krugman "now"?

the money quote (pardon me, Andrew...):

"The substance of Krugman's two columns is essentially the same.  The tone, however, is not."

And indeed, the first was a reasoned, and large favorable, examination of the strengths and weaknesses of Obama's plan.  The second was political attack that exactly corroborated Hillary Clinton's talking points for the week.  What a difference a couple of months, and the changed political exigencies of the Clinton campaign, makes.   Maybe there's enough shame to go around.

Jobeek2,

Damn this lag in submitting and publishing.....

I just went to look at both articles, and I maintain my position.  I think the earlier one was a fair and reasoned (and slightly disappointed, admittedly) analysis of Obama's plan.  The second was a politcial attack that corroborated and echoed the attacks by the Clinton campaign.  (Who, incidently, started this "Who really want's Universal Health Care", fight in the first place.)  And I've listened to and read everybody's take on this (including Jonathon Cohn's) and frankly I think it get's more muddled all the time.  There's six on one side of this argument and half a dozen on the other, but not leading with mandates is not the litmus test of whether somebody is a good Democrat or not.  It's more a pragmatic political question of how best to get this passed.  And Obama's political judgement is that mandates make it harder, no matter how much more perfect it might be as policy.  We could have another great Democratic idea that never happened, or one that's just as great that actually became law, and improve on it late.  Take your pick.

Its funny how this is presented as an example of Obama acting just like the evil Clinton press machine . . . but, can anyone point to an example of Hillary's team doing anything this blatantly dishonest?  

Check the links in the original article before you post, newdex.

newdex,

was your web name "JoeChi" in a previous incarnation?  I haven't seen him around the blogs for a while, and you seem to have picked up where he left off.  You just never miss a chance to apologize for Hillary.

But seriously, boy, get off your high horse.  The Clinton campaign (and every other one...) never cherry picked it's quotes?  And at least the Obama website included links to the original articles (all of them...) so you could read them and come to your own conclusions.  

You say the Clinton campaign never did anything this "blatantly dishonest"?

How about accusing Obama of plotting to be President since he was in Kindergarten?

And of running for the Presidency "from the day he arrived in the Senate".

Or accusing him of leaving "15 million people" out of his health care plan...as catagorical an assertion as any I've heard, based on the off the top of his head projections of one health care participant that are being debated and disputed even as we write.

Or claiming that every response he makes to her attacks is simply repeating "Republican talking points"?

Or suggesting that his entire claim to foreign policy experience was based on his time as a child in Indonesia?

But Obama's website putting up a few quotes from others, with links to the full articles themselves so you can read  them if you wish, without comment one way or the other, is somehow beyond the pale.  Have you ever heard of "intellectual dishonesty"?  Hillary's campaign reeks of it.

<b>Vanwurs,</b> it sounds to me like you're guilty of exactly what you're accusing Newdex of: shilling for one of the campaigns.

Me, I dont have a horse in this race: I dont like either of them much, Obama or Hillary. They'll both be OK presidents, especially in comparison with the Republican lot, but I've always had little sympathy for Hillary, and after seeing his campaign become increasingly weak, dilettantistic and now downright dishonest, I've little sympathy left for Obama.

You approvingly quote First Read saying, "The substance of Krugman's two columns is essentially the same.  The tone, however, is not." If you accept that, how is this Obama "fact check" page anything but a hack job? The whole page is based on the implication that, whoa, Krugman is contradicting himself, he's flip-flopped - just compare KRUGMAN THEN and KRUGMAN NOW. See how he says the opposite now from what he said then? Except that this whole impression can only be maintained by highly selective quoting, because a full reads shows that he already said the very same things then, sometimes almost literally, that they quote him as saying NOW. If you agree with me and with First Red and with Ezra Klein that in fact, "the substance of Krugman's columns is essentially the same", how is that whole charade anything but a hack job?

Now you do remark on the difference in <i>tone</i> in Krugman's articles. "What a difference a couple of months makes", you marvel, and blame it on Krugman being a mere mouthpiece for the Hillary campaign. That's a very odd assertion. Again, click the link to that first Krugman article, and you'll see that he was most critical of all back then of Hillary, who at the time hadnt released a plan at all. A shill for Hillary Krugman is not.

So what <i>did</i> change during these months to change Krugman's tone? The answer is a lot more obvious than that, and you need to look no further than what either Krugman or Klein actually said.

Here's Ezra Klein:

"the campaign's attack on Krugman raises the question they don't want to answer: What changed? When Obama's plan came out, Krugman, and me, and Jon Cohn, and all the usual suspects criticized it for lacking an individual mandate, but said that, on the overall, it was pretty good, and Obama had passed the bar. Suddenly, we're all up in arms. Why?

"Well, it was one thing when Obama simply didn't have a mechanism to achieve universality. It became a whole other when he began criticizing mechanisms to achieve universality. Previously, he'd gotten some flack for buying into the conservative argument that Social Security was in crisis. Now he was constructing a conservative argument against far-reaching reform proposals. And he kept doing it. [..] Obama's rhetoric has become much, much worse than his plan. That it's ended with him having to go on the offensive against the most forthrightly progressive voice in major American media is evidence of that fact."

And here's Krugman himself:

"I was prepared to leave it at [my original reaction] — Obama’s plan was weaker than his rivals’ because it wasn’t universal, but I hoped that he would fix that in practice. But then Obama started attacking his rivals from the right, denouncing their proposals using exactly the same false claims that conservatives will use to try to derail reform in the future. And now, having been caught out on the facts, the Obama people respond with a personal attack, lifting quotes out of context to pretend that I never had problems with the plan. Something is very wrong here."

Indeed.

vanwurs: No, I've never been JoeChi, I've only ever been newdex.  

I defend Hillary because I really think she gets a raw deal from the press most of the time and It makes me mad.  I think it should make all Democrats mad, whomever they support, because the same thing happened to Al Gore and the same thing happened to John Kerry and I'm pretty sure it will happen to whoever wins the primary, including Obama.  

In all honesty, I like Obama and I think he'd make a good president.  I think HIllary would be a good president, too.  In terms of who would be more likely to win the general, I think they both have strong points and weak points, but to tell the truth I'm starting to lean towards hoping Obama wins, because its becoming increasingly clear that HIllary will never, never get a fair shake from the press.  I don't expect Obama to get one in the general election either, but who knows?  Maybe the kids of MSM High school will be nice to him.  I'm not gonna hold my breath, but its possible.  

As for your examples, I don't think any one of those qualifies as blatantly dishonest.  In fact "accusing Obama of plotting to be President since he was in Kindergarten" is a dishonest way of describing what she said.  And yes, he has used "Republican talking points" to attack her, although more accurately, they should probably be described as "MSM talking points."  

ifearpopmusic: I read the story linked to when it came out and there's nothing in it.  Just a bunch of clueless, winy reporters who can't for the life of them understand why Hillary is so defensive.   And it all seems to date back to when the Times and the Post were trying to dig up info about a scandal - a "scandal" that is, paid for and orchestrated by a certain Richard Scaife, which never amounted to anything.  Yes, Hillary is a bad person for not trusting the press, but there's nothing in there about dishonesty.  

Newdex, (and Jobeek)

Sorry I implied bad faith...everybody has a right to their candidate, and if you think you need to provide balance in these pages, go right ahead.

But I still think Hillary has been intellectually dishonest in her latest ("When the fun begins") offense against Obama.  And I don't think Obama has said or done anything to deserve that kind of treatment other than do well in the Iowa polls and present her with a threat to her ambitions.  All of the examples I mentioned were snide and so devoid of factual support (except the "15 million" argument, which I will address in a minute...) that the response from most people was to giggle and opine that she must be getting desperate.  

Obama has spent an entire spring and summer being so well mannered that we has accused (by the Clinton campagin, among others) of being too "nice" to compete against the mean Republicans next year, and his poll numbers suffered for it.  He has racheted up his rhetoric a bit, but still speaks more elliptically than not, and lets his audiences draw their own conclusions.  When Hillary looked behind and saw him gaining on her, she rolled out ther nasty, but because Obama just doesn't have many previously established negative impressions or story lines, and the "he's so green" talking points were losing steam as the primary electorate began  to think it vauled change over experience, she had to try to suggest that, character-wise, he was just as bad as her, but she still had "experience" to boot, so there.

Much of this is just the dynamic of an increasingly closely contested and hard fought election contest.  It ain't beanbag, and neither Hillary nor Obama are deluded on that point.  But let's not lose our sense of perspective here.  The item on the website that we're debating here is well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse.  Yeah, Obama's people cherry picked their quotes, but at the end of each quote they linked to the original articles, which allows the rigorous and fairminded reader to pursue these questions to their sources and draw their own conclusions.  As most of the commenter here did.  We drew different conclusions.  I found the characterization of "blatantly" dishonest as a little extreme, and I thought you guys needed to get a grip and remember that that's pretty much how politics is played.  Using the selective quotes without encouraging the reader to check them out would have been "disohonest", this was simply written to make their case.  We all do it.  Calm down.

As for the question of mandates, this is a legitimate policy (and political) discussion, and I can quote folks to dispute Klien, Krugman, and Cohn (none of whom, sadly, or as well known as Klein, Krugman, or Cohn...whatever that says about the discussion).  Obama was pressed by Hillary and Edwards because they saw a potential weakness that the chattering class could expand on, and Obama fought back by pointing out the weaknesses he perceived in the rival plans.  And the dabate has been joined.  But my impression (admittedly partisan) is that Hillary (and to a lesser extent, Edwards) provoked this debate and has carried it to the intensity that it now pocesses. and Barack is just defending his plan without wanting to look defensive.  To my mind, the most compelling argument against mandates ( and the ultimate one, for me...) is that it's probably political suicide, dooms the entire idea of UHC and wastes one of these rare moments when we could get something done.  The various arguments over policy ( if you discount the luster of the folks arguing for mandates) seem to be a wash without a clear consensus on who's right.  

My beef with Krugman is that his "tone" has become very anti-Obama at exactly the right time for Hillary and his attacks on Obama exactly coincide with Hillary's in timing, substance, and effect. (I can't speak to his intentions.)  Coupled with his attacks on Obama's social security ideas (which also, and more unambiguously, contradict positions he had taken only a few years ago, when he was bewailing the coming crisis in Social Security) it just looks like he's doing somebody's dirty work.

And as an opinion maker he has the right to try to make opinion and influence elections.  I also have the right to call him on it if I think he is being disingenuous.  And I think he is.  But Obama's website encourages anyone who stops by to go to the originals and check it out for themselves.  Nothing "blatantly dishonest" about that.

I&#39;m a little confused by the attack on Paul Krugman over at the Obama campaign&#39;s &quot;Fact Check&quot;

Vanwurs:

I'll retract the "blatantly" from "blatantly dishonest," but I still don't think Hillary's said anything as dishonest.   I doubt its because she's a better person.  More likely, because she knows she could never get away with it.  The press would be doing backflips of joy if it cuaght her campaign making the same kind of distortions.  

One big difference between my perception and yours, it seems, is that you seem to think the fact that Hillary has "previously established negative impressions or story lines" is perfectly innocent and its OK for Obama to take advantage of that.  I think that those storylines are mostly bogus and the result of 15 years of slander from Republicans AND the press.  

I'll bite on the "When has Clinton ever been dishonest" challenge:

This is just off the top of my head, but when Clinton said her campaign did not have a policy of planting questions - after the Grinnell student incindent came out, but before the details of that incident came out, I believe she was lying. The details being the binder full of question plants that the student was shown to pick from. Actully she wasn't picking from the whole binder, just one page of the binder specifically geared to students, and labeled as such.

Another big difference between our perceptions, newdex, is that I heartly agree with most of those negative story lines about Hillary and always have.  Back in the nineties I seldom missed an oppurtunity to tell my friends that the only real problem with the Clinton Administration was HIllary, and most of the mistakes they made (with the obvious exception of the blow job, and if Hillary had been the least bit open, honest, and forthcoming about HER scandals in the first place, Ken Star wouldn't have still been around to stumble over Monica and Bill under the desk and have an oppurtunity set up Bill on a perjury charge..) were her mistakes.  She had, and has, a political tin ear and a Nixonian temperment and disposition, and she would be a disaster as both a condidate and probably as President.  Frankly, I think the negative story lines are mostly true, and Hillary is enthusiastically proving them right as she switches to desperation mode as she sees her ambitions about to be thwated.  That's not how is was supposed to be!  Doesn't Obama know what her last name is?  She's a Clinton, goddamn it!  We owe this to her!  After all she's put up with!  Thart was the deal!  Bill promised her!

Her entire campaign for the last couple weeks looks a giant hissy fit.

vanwurs:  Its pointless to try and argue about your feelings, so I won't.  I don't think anyone would try to argue that HIllary's got a golden touch.  

psantillina:  She may have lied in that instance - we don't know for sure.  But that's a very different sort of situation from what we're talking about here - the Krugman hit piece.